Assisted Focus
Assisted Focus is a Human Factors and Artificial Intelligence solution to the common problem of information ambiguity and clutter on displays. The solution consists of two parts: (1) heuristic automation to identify and prioritize objects of high interest, and (2) attention management to help users focus on the objects of interest without losing awareness of the situation.
Heuristic automation involves combining or fusing ambiguous data about objects on a tactical display to create an assessment and prioritization of the objects in a task-relevant way.The automation is heuristic in the sense that it uses rules-of-thumb to compute the assessment.
One reason for the success of the Assisted Focus concept is that the automation does not need to be perfect.
Our results demonstrate that approximate assessments can produce significant operational performance gains when the automation is incorporated into an ergonomically designed display. Users can continue to make their own expert decisions while being assisted by the automatic assessments and prioritizations.
The attention management component consists of establishing a visual salience gradient by highlighting high priority objects and dimming lower priority objects. This salience gradient allows users to scan the display and gain awareness of high priority objects quickly and with minimal effort. Yet, all objects remain visible for inspection by the user, so that the user continues to maintain full situation awareness.
We have developed and proven the concept of Assisted Focus in an air defense situation. Fully 93% of expert users preferred Assisted Focus to a standard display, and response time to threats was improved by 45% for evolving threats.
The Assisted Focus concept is applicable to a wide range of complex monitoring tasks such as air traffic control, missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, meteorology, oceanography, tactical situation awareness, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
References and Downloads
St. John, M., Smallman, H. S., Manes, D. I., Feher, B. A., & Morrison, J. G. (2005). Heuristic automation for decluttering tactical displays.
Human Factors, 47, 509-525.
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St. John , M. (2004). Assisted focus overview. Brief. San Diego, CA: Pacific Science & Engineering Group, Inc.
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St. John, M., Manes, D. I., Smallman, H. S., Feher, B. A., & Morrison, J. G. (2004). Heuristic automation for decluttering tactical displays. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 48 th Annual Meeting (pp. 416-420). Santa Monica , CA : Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
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St. John, M. & Manes, D. I. (2002). Making unreliable automation useful. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 46th Annual Meeting (pp. 332-336). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
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St. John, M., Feher, B. A., & Morrison, J. G. (2002). Evaluating alternative symbologies for decluttering geographical displays (technical report SSC-1890). San Diego, CA: Space and Naval Warfare System Center.
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Liebhaber, M. J., Kobus, D. A., & Feher, B. A. (2002). Studies of U.S. Navy air defense threat assessment: Cues, information order, and impact of conflicting data (technical report SSC-1888). San Diego, CA: Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center.
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Liebhaber, M.J. & Smith, C.A.P. (2000). Naval Air Threat Assessment. In 2000 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium . Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.
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